Chomsky: Richest countries are racing toward disaster

Answering a question in an interview with Salon.com about the contemporary issues which particularly concerns him, the scholar answered that there are two major problems from among a long list that are worth mentioning.

“These are issues that seriously threaten the possibility of decent human survival. One of them is the growing threat of environmental catastrophe, which we are racing towards as if we were determined to fall off a precipice, and the other is the threat of nuclear war, which has not declined, in fact it’s very serious and in many respects is growing,” Chomsky said.

He added that these threats are emanating from world’s most power countries while indigenous societies are trying to avoid them.
“It’s quite striking to see that those in the lead of trying to do something about this catastrophe are what we call “primitive” societies. The first nations in Canada, indigenous societies in central America, aboriginals in Australia. They’ve been on the forefront of trying to prevent the disaster that we’re rushing towards.”

“It’s beyond irony that the richest most powerful countries in the world are racing towards disaster while the so-called primitive societies are the ones in the forefront of trying to avert it,” he went on to add.

Talking about the scope and depth of US spying scandal, Chomsky said that he was not shocked by the revelations made by Edward Snowden, a former contractor to US National Security Agency (NSA) and CIA.

“Governments are power systems,” Chomsky said.

“They are trying to sustain their power and domination over their populations and they will use what means are available to do this.”

Referring to the US invasion of the Philippines about a century ago as an example, he noted that Washington used a sophisticated spying system to suppress any possible uprising by the nation.

“…right after the US invasion of the Philippines — a brutal invasion that killed a couple hundred thousand people — there was a problem for the US of pacification afterwards. What do you do to control the population to prevent another nationalist uprising? There’s a very good study of this by Alfred McCoy, a Philippines scholar at University of Wisconsin, and what he shows is that the US used the most sophisticated technology of the day to develop a massive system of surveillance, control, disruption to undermine any potential opposition and to impose very tight controls on the population which lasted for a long time and in many ways the Philippines is still suffering from this.”